Carroll Shelby went full throttle through life

Famed racer and performance-car builder Carroll Shelby, who died last week at 89 years old, had a tremendous impact on automotive industry that lasted decades. His name and contributions will live on.

The native Texan from Leesburg, whose achievements I’ve followed for many years, was at the top of my list of interesting interviews. The following is a Q&A from the last meeting I had with the outspoken Shelby about three years ago:

When did you start developing your affinity for fast cars?

I’ve always loved that, from the time I was 3 years old. Like old Foyt when he raced “Doc” Cossey when he was a kid.

My dad was a rural mail carrier in Leesburg and, later, a postal clerk in Dallas. I turned 14 and two days later I got my driver’s license. We had a ’34 Dodge and I said, Dad, can I take you to work? He said, `Yeah,’ and I got caught doing 80 miles per hour out on East Pike there in Dallas. I got grounded for six months.

How did you get into racing?

I’d always been around it. I went to racetracks from the time I was 9 or 10 years old. I used to ride my bicycle out there. They had all those dirt tracks around Dallas. Then after the war – I got out after five years in the Air Force – I started hanging around the racetracks. I went out and raced junk cars a little bit, and then somebody said, `Do you want to drive my MG?’ I drove it in a race and won that. It just went on from there. Three years later I was working for a factory in Europe. I never did get into the dirt tracks.

What’s that story about you wearing coveralls to the racetrack?

I had a chicken farm and I went broke in it. I was vaccinating my chickens one day and my wife called me and said, `You’re supposed to be at the Eagle Mountain race in an hour.’ So I jumped in my pickup with my overalls on and I won the race, and they put more pictures in the paper than when I had ever won a race before, so I started wearing them all of the time.

I milked that. `Affectation’ I used to call it.

Did you have any bad racing accidents?

In Mexico, local Indians found me and got me drunk as I was laying there with my elbow knocked off. For 12 months I had a whole bunch of operations. I won about 10 or 12 races with my arm in a cast. I would tape it to the steering wheel. I’ve got a crooked arm now. It hurts my golf game a little bit.

How did your transition to a race-car builder begin?

I had been building two or three cars, and wanted to build my own car for years. That was the reason I drove race cars. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t a complete passion. It wasn’t everything to me. I wanted to learn how to build my own car.

Ford came out with a new little V-8 engine. Chevy had their V-8. And about that time, AC Cars lost their Bristol contract. So I thought that I would try to put two and two together, and I went to AC and told them that I had this Ford engine. Dave Evans from Ford gave me a couple of them. I sent them over there to them. We started putting one together and Dave said, `I’d like for you to come back to Detroit.’ Lee Iacocca was sales manager of the Ford division then. I went in and said, `If you give me $25,000 I’ll build two prototypes of this car that’ll kick the stuff out of the Corvette.’ He said, `We better give that guy $25,000 before he bites somebody.’

I built two cars and we took them before 4,000 dealers at the big dealer deal there in Detroit, and both of them blew up in front of 4,000 dealers. You know, the radiator – they made us sit around and idle and idle and idle. We hadn’t developed the car yet.

Was Henry II behind all of this?

Iacocca was the originator. He’s the one that made it happen for me. Then, Edsel (Ford II) came out and lived at my house and worked with me when he was 15 years old, with hair down to his belt buckle. Then Henry got involved in it.

How serious of a track car was that first Shelby GT-350 Mustang?

I didn’t think that we could make a sports car out of it. Iacocca said, `You’ve got to do it.’ I went back to John Bishop at SCCA and said, What do we have to do John? I’ve been told to do it. He said, `Take the back seat out, put 300 horsepower in it, put bigger brakes on it and put a roll cage in it. I put a budget together of $15,000 to build the two prototypes and the bean counters cut it down to $1,500.

It turned out to be a successful program. And then the Mustang got too heavy, just like the Thunderbird did.

How did the GT-500′s `King of the Road’ name come about?

Iacocca had a guy, Henry, who was his left-hand man and his right-hand man. I went back there one day and Henry said, `Look here, I’ve got this brochure that says Corvette has come out with King of the Road. I picked up the telephone and called by trade-dress lawyer in Washington and said, Has King of the Road been taken? He called me back and said, `No it’s not taken.’ I said, You better be there at 8 o’clock in the morning to take it then.

I called California and said, How many GT-500s are you building next week? They said, `We’re building 50 convertibles and 50 hardtops.’ I said, Well, we’re going call them GT-500KRs.

What was the true horsepower of the GT-500KRs?

Honest, that was about 475. We called it 335, but that’s because the horsepower race was getting some bad publicity.

Back in 1964 when your car defeated Ferrari, how big was that to you and the racing world?

We’re still getting quite a bit of press coverage over it because no one has ever done it since then. That’s what I kind of hang my hat on – the publicity for the company’s concern.

How was your relationship with Enzo Ferrari?

He offered six times for me to come drive for him, but I never did want to. I think he was a real pioneer after the war, but he played games with his drivers. I was much more content with a slower car, which was Aston Martin at the time, and we had a contented team.

The reason I was over there was that I spent a lot of time with Dino Ferrari, the whole summer of ’55, and I’d go around to the manufacturing facility with him. I spent a lot of time seeing how they did things, because that’s really what I wanted to do – build my own car.

It hasn’t affected it yet. I don’t expect it to because of all of the things that they keep talking about – electric, solar and all of this stuff – they really don’t have an alternative to take the place of the Otto Cycle engine. Actually, Washington has been running the automobile business since 1970. They wonder why General Motors is broke. Nobody knows what to build because every time they get a new regime in there they make so many changes that they run the price of cars up. Obama suddenly says we’re going to 40 miles per gallon by a certain time — well, you know that has to give them dysentery.

Are you working on any new projects?

I have a deal with a little college (Northeast Texas Community College near Mount. Pleasant) down there. There’s 40 percent of the kids who drop out down there. We have the Carroll Shelby School of Automotive Technology Program, and we’re taking those drop-outs, sending them to school for two years and they go from $7 and hour to $35 an hour. That’s what I’m really looking forward to.

6 Responses

Cool guy that grew up with my mom in East Texas. She too got her driver’s license at 14. Remarkable that a guy could start out in the smallest county in Texas and get to where he did doing what he did. Mt. Pleasant, Pittburg, Leesburg, Newsome were chicken farms and oil fields when I was a kid.

I wonder if he built any cars for moon shiners. Camp County was dry until sometime in the 80′s and I recall one of my older cousins had a screaming ’61 Ford that he used for that.

There is a very nice video of his time and effort to build the 6 original AC Cobras that he used to beat Enzo Ferrari in the 60′s out there on the internets. They either destroyed or allowed them to be cannablized because on the classic car cirquit it would be the Honus Wagner type of specimen if one showed up. I think the video mentions Ford wanted to go with the GT-40 style of racer the year after he beat Ferrari.

One of his later projects was developing early Mustang Fastback replicas. You can buy the entire car now from one of his companies and he bought a whole lot of junk 66 Fastbacks just for their titles.

He was a giant in the automotive industry, and an innovator and creative genius. He will go down in history along with Harley Earl, Duntov, Virgil Exner, Lee Iacocca, etc. And painted, I also have several items on my ’68 GT500KR signed by Carroll, I suspect they will become much more valuable now, so I may have to remove them for safe keeping during shows in the future.